Travel Carbon Footprint Dashboard

Context

I traveled Central America for 7 months and wanted to monitor the C02 emissions of my journey.

Methodology

I started consigning the trips to spreadsheet and added automation progressively. I used AppScript to make a Google Sheets function to call the google maps API to get the distance between two locations. I then used the distance to calculate the emissions using the emissions factor of the vehicle. I then used the emissions to calculate the carbon footprint of each trip. This spreadsheet is then used as the data source in a Looker Dashboard.
I also wanted to be able to enter the data through a nice form from my phone so I deployed a ODK Central server on an AWS EC2 and set up the form that could be retrieved from the phone. There is then a small python code to insert the data into the spreadsheet that is scheduled with a crontab. Also use opensource code instead of Gmaps API for the geocoding and route distance calculation

Tools

• Google Sheets
• Open Data Kit (ODK)
• Python : pandas, geopy, routingpy, pyODK
• AWS EC2, AWS Eventbridge
• VSCode for development

My involvment

This a personal experimentation project that I did on my own.

Results and achievements

• Find an easy and convienient way to deploy forms to a phone without needing to develop an App
• demonstrate how much the plane emissions outweigh all the other means of transportation